The Collected Works of C. G. Jung - Vol. 9, pt. 1

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung - Vol. 9, pt. 1

Synopsis

Essays which state the fundamentals of Jung's psychological system: "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" and "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," with their original versions in an appendix.

Excerpt

The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions. This has been the case with the concept of the unconscious in general. After the philosophical idea of the unconscious, in the form presented chiefly by Carus and von Hartmann, had gone down under the overwhelming wave of materialism and empiricism, leaving hardly a ripple behind it, it gradually reappeared in the scientific domain of medical psychology.

2 At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious—at least metaphorically— take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thoughtforms.

3 A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to

[First published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934, and later revised and published in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954), from which version the present translation is made. The translation of the original version, by Stanley Dell, in The Integration of the Personality (New York, 1939; London, 1940), has been freely consulted.—EDITORS.]

In his later works Freud differentiated the basic view mentioned here. He called the instinctual psyche the “id,” and his “super-ego” denotes the collective consciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partly unconscious (because it is repressed).